Chapter 813

After the discussion on Monday afternoon, Amy Pascal began to contact the leaders of the three old public television networks. This is of course a smoke bomb. Simon's real goal has never changed.

In the face of danielis Entertainment's acquisition intention, the three major TV networks have given a quite positive response.

Jack Welch, chairman and CEO of General Electric Group, the parent company of NBC, called Simon directly after Amy contacted him. However, Jack Welch said on the phone that general electric did not want to give up the media business completely, but wanted to sell half of its equity to Denise entertainment, which obviously could not meet Simon's requirements.

Larry Tisch, the actual controller of CBS, wants to talk to Simon face to face. Simon's interest in CBS is lower than NBC '.

Not only that, the circle also quickly spread the rumors that danilisi entertainment intends to buy CBS, leading to a significant rise in CBS share price. Simon is happy to see the confusion, but his impression of Larry Tisch has dropped to the freezing point.

It is a violation of the rules that the merger and acquisition agreement has not been achieved and information has been quietly released.

The ultimate goal is still ABC.

At the melisandro party after the Oscars at the end of March, Simon had a contact with Warren Buffett, the major shareholder of ABC Group in metropolis. Warren Buffett did not resist the sale of ABC. However, the veteran investor obviously had a tangle between the cash and stock trading modes, and tried to come up with a debt to equity swap scheme that Simon could not accept.

In the past month or so, driven by the overall bull market trend of the U.S. stock market, the market value of Metro ABC Group has reached nearly $17 billion. Similarly, the market value of danireis Entertainment Group also exceeded 140 billion dollars, thanks to the good news of Osaka Universal Studios.

The stock prices of both sides have created their own new highs, and in the view of the capital market, they are also somewhat inflated.

With Buffett's prudent investment style and the upcoming capital gains tax reform bill, it is more and more likely that this veteran investor will directly choose to cash out Metro ABC.

The all cash acquisition will not dilute the Westeros family's shareholding in danielis entertainment, which is also the result Simon most wants to see.

danielis Entertainment Group has more than $7 billion in cash reserves, and the current overall debt is only $7.3 billion. Compared with the market value, the debt ratio is only 5%. Even if the all cash acquisition of metropolitan ABC Group, additional bond financing is needed The debt ratio of danielis entertainment will only be raised to about 15%.

For most enterprises, the debt scale of 15% can only be described conservatively, which is completely within the controllable risk range.

Now, the biggest problem between the two sides is actually to negotiate a reasonable price.

Simon has a lot of money, but he won't do anything wrong.

Since it is a bona fide acquisition, Simon can accept about 30% of the premium. If a lion opens his mouth like Larry Tisch, Simon is willing to talk more with GE. Besides not willing to let go, Jack Welch is very sincere in cooperation.

Busy in 1995, the summer file officially opened.

On Friday, May 12, the first summer blockbuster movie "red tide storm" was released. Jerry brookheimer, Tony Scott, Denzel Washington and other well-known Hollywood filmmakers collaborated on the submarine war movie, which cost 53 million US dollars. The producer Disneyland company prepared 2383 opening screens for the movie.

From this point of view, confidence is obviously insufficient.

At the same time, a biographical novel adapted from New World pictures, diary on the edge, starring young "little plum" Leonardo DiCaprio and mark Warburg, who is still a little fresh meat, tells a story about a fallen youth who plays truant, takes drugs, plays basketball and is addicted to drugs.

This low-cost youth film, with a production cost of 7 million US dollars, is similar to Gus Van Sant's box office blockbuster "psychedelic Cowboy" a few years ago. There are many beautiful men, beautiful women and hot-blooded spendthrift young people in the rebellious period. Despite the poor reputation of film critics in the trial stage, the new world film industry still gave 516 opening screens to try to make a breakthrough here It's going to be a long summer holiday.

In a word, with the completion of the edge diary publicity, little Li Zi has entered the modern version of Romeo and Juliet.

It's also a new world project.

Australian director Baz Luhmann made his debut in Hollywood three years ago with the film "heroes of the dance nation". Later, the director who obviously likes to work slowly and carefully prepared for the new film for three years. During this period, he also participated in stage drama creation for a period of time. Recently, he finally started shooting his own new film.

It was with the box office success of this modern version of Romeo and Juliet that the former little plum was promoted to be a popular little boy, and then got the role of Titanic.Simon is not going to change that.

At the same time as the summer program started, the two dark horse films "this man from Earth" and "fight smart star 3" in the first half of the year still stick to the North American cinema.

Just in the past box office week from May 5 to May 11, the 11th week of "this man is from the earth", the box office of which received another $2.53 million in a single week, and the cumulative box office has reached $229.31 million. The film is expected to be completely completed before the release of "Jurassic Park 2" on June 2, and the total box office in North America is about $235 million.

It's 235 million US dollars, slightly lower than the 250 million US dollars expected earlier. If we look into the reason carefully, it's because of the too strong power of "fight smart star 3", which has squeezed out the box office potential of about 15 million US dollars of "this man from the earth".

In the fifth week of its release, the box office of "fight smart 3", which started on April 7, dropped 23% compared with last week's, continued to earn $14.69 million, and the cumulative box office reached $143.45 million. There are still three weeks to go before the release of Jurassic Park 2 on June 2. According to the steady decline trend of 20% for several consecutive weeks, there is still great hope that the total domestic box office of the film will exceed 200 million US dollars.

Simon was in San Francisco on May 12.

With the completion of the ESOP, igritte's IPO is ready and can submit a prospectus to the SEC at any time, so it doesn't need Simon's too much attention.

This time, it's mainly about dinkober.

In recent years, the electronic products company founded by Simon's c-girl has taken advantage of the Internet, and has been developing rapidly all the way.

In the past year of 1994, tincobail's main digital camera product shipment volume reached 7.16 million units. Compared with 1993, it achieved a high growth of 159%. With some other products such as portable flash disk, iDisk and so on, the annual revenue reached 2.19 billion US dollars and the net profit was 270 million US dollars.

Unknowingly, this new concept technology enterprise has grown into an electronic product giant that can not be underestimated in the industry.

In a series of products released on April 8, after careful preliminary market research, the latest icam-50, dinkbaier team finally gave up the strategy of squeezing toothpaste to keep 300000 pixels, but upgraded to 500000 pixels. However, the original capacity of 3000 photos in 150m was also reduced to 1000 photos in 120m.

According to the survey data, many potential users feel that the capacity of 3000 photos is too exaggerated to use up. 1000 copies, which not only shows the product advantages of the latest version of icam-50, but also does not make users feel that the performance is excessive, which is just right.

It increases the resolution of the sensor, reduces the storage capacity, and balances the costs of the new icam-50 to the greatest extent.

Moreover, the icam-50 still maintains a retail price of $499, which is very attractive to users of the old version of ICAM. As a transitional diskette version of the icam-40s, which still uses a 300000 pixel sensor, tincobail also lowered its price to $449.

As another main product, iplayer-10 adopts a 500m capacity micro hard disk, which is also the most expensive core component in this digital music player.

According to igritte's MP3 audio format, iplayer-10 can store 100 to 150 songs for up to 500 minutes, equivalent to eight hours. Although it will inevitably be at the cost of losing sound quality, in fact, many facts have proved that most ordinary users do not have high requirements for player sound quality.

The biggest limitation of the promotion of iPlayer digital music player is actually the content.

The broadcast website, which was set up several years in advance by westrow system, successfully solved this problem.

Along with the release of iplayer-10, danelis entertainment has provided 300000 pieces of genuine music for the broadcast website, including the popular records of backstreet boys and gun roses in recent years, as well as all the singles Simon has released in recent years. Although compared with the scale of music copyright in the whole European and American music circle, 300000 pieces of genuine music are still very few, and in fact, they are not all owned by Denise records. However, the audio books, talk shows, educational courses and other legitimate film review resources on broadcast website make up for the lack of music resources to a large extent.

Moreover, the difficulty of cracking iPlayer is very low.

This also means that users can easily obtain all kinds of pirated music from the Internet platform.

In the west, people have a very wide habit of paying for genuine products. Only when they have something to sell, in fact, many people are willing to pay for genuine products.

Of course, if the genuine resources can not be found, then, I'm sorry.

As soon as iPlayer was released, the industry soon noticed this problem, and some record manufacturers threatened to sue.Simon's attitude towards this is that he's just a general.

There was a case that Sony won the VCR lawsuit in those years. In fact, it is very difficult to win this kind of lawsuit.

Simon's personal attitude is not to connive at piracy for the promotion of iPlayer. He hopes that through the rapid popularization of this product, the major record manufacturers will agree to put their music on the broadcast website.

The Internet is a rather wild open platform.

If you don't want weeds to grow in this field, the best way is to carefully cultivate all kinds of useful crops.

That's the truth.

On April 8, the press conference was held, and on April 15, it was officially put on sale. As of May 11, it was just four weeks. Excluding the edge products such as icam-40s and idisk-20 used for transition, tincobail's two main products this year, icam-50 digital camera with micro hard disk version and iplayer-10 digital music player, were extremely popular in the market.

Because the initial production capacity is still climbing, especially the iplayer-10, out of caution, the dinkbaier team did not stock too much, so they chose to open another "hunger marketing" in the flagship store of Amazon online mall, which has been officially settled in. It has to be said that this simple and crude marketing mode still has very good effect, coupled with the tracking of multimedia Report, more and more caused two new products hot market situation.

As a result of being too popular and frequently out of stock in the market, robbery cases against two electronic products have even occurred frequently in North America recently.

The same price of $499, in fact, is mainly for the middle class with relatively comfortable family conditions. After all, only these families have matching personal computers and Internet access. ICAM has a strong dependence on PC. before the appearance of iPlayer, there was no frequent robbery.

However, the iplayer-10 is lighter than Sony's Walkman, but it can hold hundreds of songs at one time. Moreover, even if there is no Internet connection at home, you can easily download all the music you can imagine in the Internet cafes all over North America. Such an artifact is a dream for many music lovers.

You know, in 1977, the blackout in New York City, many audio equipment stores were looted the most, and to a large extent created the rise of hip-hop music.

All right.

Yes, most of the robbers were black.

It's the same this time.

For the iPlayer released by tincobail company, it can not only be used by itself, but also because of the shortage of goods, the price of black market acquisition is quite considerable. As a result, there are frequent robberies specifically for this product. ICAM, as a brother in need, is also involved. They are all products of the same company. It is said that they are very powerful, so it must be right to rob them.

There was even a homicide case in Chicago. A couple was listening to music with iplayer-10 and taking photos with the latest icam-50 on the Bank of Lake Michigan. It was probably too conspicuous. Even in the day when people came and went around, they were robbed by two black youths. The boy in the couple was stabbed by a sharp blade because of resistance, lost too much blood and died.

Two black youths were arrested and the murder charges were set.

However, the two poor guys could only be thrown into prison, and the boy's parents were depressed. They also filed a lawsuit against tincobail company, believing that tincobail's products indirectly led to the unfortunate incident, and the claim was $100 million.

There are so many unreasonable lawsuits in the United States.

While actively responding to the lawsuit, tingcobaier had to remind users to keep a low profile in the process of using "I" series products through some media, which became the focus of discussion for a while.

These episodes did not affect the hot sales of the two new products.

In the first week of opening up sales, it was only the North American market. Taking into account the booking, icam-50 had a weekly sales volume of 320000 units. In other synchronous markets such as Japan, the United Kingdom and Australia, the sales volume also reached 130000 units, totaling more than 450000 units in the first week of the world.

This is still under the situation that some important markets such as France and Germany have not been able to open their sales at the same time.

Iplayer-10 is temporarily limited to the North American market.

In the first week, the first 100000 iplayer-10 units were sold out. Starting from the second week, tincobail launched 200000 iplayer-10 units to the market every week, and the supply still exceeded the demand.

As of May 11, the total global sales of icam-50 had reached 1.53 million units in four weeks. The four week shipment volume of iplayer-10 players reached 700000 in a neat way.

Even if the sales volume of iplayer-10 is less than half of that of icam-50, many people can see that this digital music player product is more promising than ICAM Series in terms of popularity and potential market capacity.

Iplayer-10 has not only caused frequent robberies in North America, but also in the second-hand market, the price of most of the re sold iplayer-10 is even higher than the official price. There have even been cases where someone has successfully sold the iplayer-10 at a price of $1200 on eBay, an auction platform supported by westero system, which is more than double the price of $499.So the scalpers appeared.

In a word, because of the wide demand for music in the west, the market capacity of digital music player is much larger than that of digital camera. With Apple's closed attitude, the annual sales volume of iPods in the peak period of that year was more than 50 million. At that time, the era of smart phones had come, and in fact, the golden age of digital music player promotion had been missed.

Now, with the rise of the Internet and the lack of popularity of intelligent devices, it is the best time to promote digital music players.